Ethnic stereotypes and group-serving bias in attribution in multiethnic primary schools

The present study analyses, for the first time within Italian contexts, group-serving bias in attribution in 397 elementary school children – 297 Italian and 100 Moroccan. Subjects attended the same primary school classes. Participants were given the materials developed by Primi & Agnoli (2002) along with a questionnaire whose purpose was to verify the causes assigned by the children to hypothetical positive and negative behaviours of in-group and out-group members. The results are in line with those of prior researches confirming group serving bias in attribution with both majority (Italian) and minority (Moroccan) group members. In particular the Italian children assigned internal causes to positive behaviours and external causes to negative behaviours when they were asked to judge members of their own group. On the contrary out-group positive behaviours were assigned external causes, while negative behaviours by the out-group were given internal causes. The Moroccan children made analogous attributions of cause to the behaviours of the host group, but they attributed both positive and negative behaviours to internal causes when they judged their own group. The novel contribution of the study concerns the findings that this bias varies as a function of mutual familiarity such that the older children, who were attending the same school since long, appear to display less biased behavioural attributions